This
is my first visit to Thunder Bay so thank you for inviting me to speak at your
AGM.

In
my work as a Street Nurse, I’m usually overwhelmed trying to deal with the
day-to-day emergencies in the homelessness disaster.If I have time left over, I like to spend it strategizing on what we need
to do to turn things around, and bring us back to the days of a national housing
program.So I will talk to you about
both, today’s reality and our continuing struggle.

When
I am invited to a new community, I usually do some research before I go, so I
would like to begin by saying a few words on what I found out about
Thunder Bay
.I learned quite a bit about your
community.

My good friend and filmmaker Laura Sky filmed two of her documentaries here, Crisis
Call and Prescription For Addiction.I learned through Laura about some of

Thunder Bay
’s strong social justice networks.I
also learned that
Thunder Bay
has produced some great musicians like Bobby Curtola and Paul Shaffer, and also
some great hockey players, like Jack Adams, Alexander Auld and Eric Staal.As a nurse however, I was most intrigued to find out about the great
nurses that came from your community and the history those nurses helped shape.

For example – with the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Mother
Monica and several nursing sisters from the Order of the Sisters of Saint Joseph
came to

Port Arthur
in 1881.They worked tirelessly to
nurse the many casualties among the population of railway workers.Their clinic/convent eventually provided the momentum for
St. Joseph
’s
General
Hospital
.I know the sisters would have been
useful in dealing with the economic casualties of unemployment and poverty that
resulted from the decline in your transportation and forestry industries.

There
is a lot we can learn from the nurses of
Thunder Bay
’s past.Like when 80 immigrants
were quarantined for smallpox in 1893, in a camp just outside of town.The Victorian Order of Nurses responded, developing a Cottage Hospital by
1901.These same nurses would have
some strategies today on quarantine and safe ‘camp or shelter’ conditions,
should
Thunder Bay
ever come to experience the pandemic.They
sure would have taught me a thing or two as I helped set up the infrastructure
for the Tent City in downtown Toronto which, at its peak, was a community of 120
homeless people in over 50 shacks with woodstoves, one source of running water
and 6 portable toilets.
Tent
City
turned out to be the largest act of civil disobedience by homeless people since
the Great Depression.

Canadian
nurses serving overseas in WW 1 earned the right to the rank of officer.But local nurse, Miss Elizabeth Smellie from
Port Arthur
, who was Matron-in-chief of the Army Nursing Service, was the first woman and
the first nurse to ever be made a Colonel.She
was also a key builder of the Victoria Order of Nurses.

As
both a Colonel and as a nurse, I can’t help but wonder what Ms. Smellie might
think of Canada’s annual defense spending – which was $15.5 billion for
2005, and growing rapidly under the Conservatives, versus the drastic cuts we
all saw to spending on social housing.As
a nurse, I think she would be shocked to see the extent of homelessness in our
towns and cities, the epidemic of hunger, the disparity between First Nations
people and the rest of the population, the low minimum wages, and the seemingly
willful and intentional neglect by our senior levels of government.

.

Today’s
reality

Sometimes
we hear that ‘the poor will always be with us’, that there will always be
people with special needs, and yes, to a certain extent there will always be
vulnerable populations in western culture.But
what is distinctly different today, than from the days of Nurse Smellie and the
nursing sisters, is the purposeful and intentional collection of forces,
policies and practices that have created this vulnerability.

Globalization,
the dismantling of social safety nets, the privatization of public services, and
the dramatic changes that man-made and also natural disasters are having on our
communities is creating havoc in mass numbers, especially with such depleted
social programs and infrastructure.

I
remember very clearly how soon I saw men in a homeless shelter after the Toronto
Inglis plant closed following the Free Trade agreement.Within mere weeks of Mike Harris canceling 17,000 units of affordable
housing and imposing the 21.6% welfare cuts, we saw the number of people who
were forced to use drop-in centres for food and rely on emergency shelters, more
than double.We all saw
people who had faced job loss, economic evictions and welfare cuts who suddenly
found themselves homeless, never believing they could end up there.

Ontario
communities, and I’m sure that includes
Thunder Bay
, witnessed a number of practices that created or worsened this inequity and the
social chaos. There was:

ØAmalgamation

ØDownloading of services such as social
housing and other programs

ØHospital closures and mergers

ØWelfare rate cuts and the introduction of
workfare

ØTighter eligibility criteria for ODSP –
in fact there existed an unspoken practice by ODSP of what seemed to be an
automatic first application denial, in addition to tighter ID criteria since
September 11

ØCancellation of the federal and also
Ontario
’s affordable housing programs

ØDelisting of services, such as eye exams

ØThe restructuring and rationing of
services.In
Toronto
, street outreach services can no longer give survival supplies such as food or
sleeping bags to homeless people sleeping outside.

ØSubtle but intentional redefining of
services, with increasing reliance on policing and security firms to deal with
social issues.For example, Laura
Sky’s movie Crisis Call shows
clearly the result of the lack of supportive housing for people with mental
health issues

ØIntroduction of OHIP premiums, a
regressive surtax on middle income earners

ØAnd of course…corporate tax cuts!

This
is the context for where we are today on a number of social fronts.

The
making of a disaster

The World Health Organization describes a disaster as

“any
occurrence that causes damage, ecological disruption, loss of human life,
deterioration of health and health services on a scale sufficient to warrant an
extraordinary response from outside the affected community.”

I
had the particular vantage point of being a Street Nurse working at what can
only be described as the epicentre of homelessness in
Canada, at the corner of Sherbourne and Dundas in downtown east Toronto.It was from that vantage point that I began seeing things I couldn’t at
first explain, and things I couldn’t easily treat or prevent.There was a seemingly endless stream of new people entering the shelter
system, people who remained homeless year after year, and an array of illness
and infection that people suffered through while living in a shelter or worse -
outside.I was stunned!I saw people with pretty severe infections like pneumonia or recovering
from surgery in a shelter, people on medication for tuberculosis, and meanwhile
more and more people deciding to sleep outside rather than enter crowded and
unhealthy shelters.I remember one
day sitting in the All Saints Church drop-in thinking – I’ve gone to more
funerals and memorial services in this job than anywhere else and I’m a
community health nurse, not a palliative care nurse.

In
1995-96 things grew exponentially worse – a direct result of the 1993
cancellation by the federal government of the national housing program and the
1995 cancellation of
Ontario
’s program.As conditions got
worse we saw clusters of deaths, the return of tuberculosis, malnutrition, mass
outdoor sleeping, and the horrible effects of crowding in shelters.

I
joined with several colleagues to form the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee.In the summer of 1998 we wrote a report called the State of Emergency
Declaration, which used statistics and referenced the UN Charters that
Canada
had signed.It was a passionate
document, at a very basic literacy level and it was to the point.

Then,
in October 1998 we held a press conference and declared homelessness a National
Disaster.What we saw was not
unique to
Toronto
.We believed that
Toronto
was the canary in the mineshaft of homelessness in
Canada
.

We
released the State of
Emergency Declaration
(www.tdrc.net), and we called for two things:

First,
that federal emergency relief monies be released to communities across the
country so they could provide disaster relief for their rapidly growing homeless
populations. This effort is not unlike what happened in the
United States
in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Second,
we called for a long-term solution, the 1% solution – a National Housing
Program where all levels of government would spend an additional 1% of their
budgets to build affordable housing. The One Per Cent Solution originates from research
done by Professor David Hulchanski, who determined that when our federal,
provincial, territorial and municipal governments were allocating money to
social housing they were spending on average 1% of their budgets.

The
first item we called for – the federal emergency relief monies essentially
occurred.Homelessness in
Canada
was catapulted on the national and international scene.Shamed by UN condemnations of
Canada
’s record, Prime Minister Chrétien appointed Claudette Bradshaw as our first
ever Minister Responsible for
Homelessness and ‘SCPI’ (Supporting Community Partnerships Initiatives)
monies were rolled out across the country - hundreds of millions of dollars!So,
Canada
had the distinction of having a Minister Responsible for Homelessness but not a
Minister with full responsibility for housing! The hundreds of millions of SCPI
dollars were, in effect, disaster relief monies.

Regarding
the second demand – the 1% solution – more recently former Minister Fontana
brought us closer to this objective with national consultations and a proposed
new Canada Housing Framework agreement but surprise, surprise, the successive
Liberal budgets had zero dollars for housing.The Layton-Martin budget deal that led to Bill C-48 included $1.6 billion
for housing over two years, but then the Liberal government was defeated in the
last federal election.

Today,
as you may know, $1.4 billion for housing was included in the recent Harper
Conservative budget, to flow over three years instead of two.No strings attached but also seemingly little criteria or accountability.
Trust funds will hold the money, leaving provinces to determine the mechanisms
to roll the monies out.

There
are many unanswered questions:

·Will it be topped up in
Ontario
with matching funds or any funds?

·Will it be earmarked for co-op housing?

·Social housing?

·Rent supplements or housing allowances?

·Private home ownership schemes?

·Will we see any social housing units
created by the spring of 2007?

In
addition the
Ontario
government added no new money in its recent budget and its track record in
rolling out earlier monies from the Affordable Housing Program is abysmal.

Fighting For Tomorrow

It
does seem that funding wins or policy wins only occur when there is a momentum
of public protest, media scrutiny or public and legal inquiry through court and
inquest proceedings – which many of us have become quite experienced at.

For example, there were a
series of events that forced us to react to the crisis.These crisis included inadequate drop-in centre funding, a cluster of
homeless freezing deaths, a community inquiry into policing practices towards
the homeless, and a community inquiry into conditions at Seaton House (the
largest emergency shelter in
Canada
).Each struggle had in common the
following: a sophisticated street level knowledge, the formation of
coalitions/committees and advocacy groups, the inclusion of both homeless/underhoused
people with strategic allies such as professors and lawyers, the involvement and
creative use of the media and both traditional and non-traditional tactics to
shift public policy at City/Metro Hall.

These
wins can be measured by dollars and outcomes.This is some of what we
achieved:

·the establishment of the City of
Toronto Advisory Committee
on Homeless and Socially Isolated Persons – to advise City Council

·$600,000 new emergency funding for
drop-in centres

·an Inquest into freezing deaths and a
huge public outcry when the presiding coroner wouldn’t allow evidence on the
housing crisis

·reduced harassment of homeless people by
police – at least for a while

·more humane policies at Seaton House,
including funding for renovations

·many new shelters opened including
federal armouries during the winter months

·Public health research into the
prevalence of tuberculosis in the homeless population, which showed a 38% latent
TB infection rate

We
made some significant wins, and it is important to celebrate them.But we can’t lose sight of the fact that we will need many more wins if
we are to bring about a national housing program.

Strategies

Your
mission, should you choose to accept it, is to challenge what is a national
emergency and an enormous human rights scandal.I have three ideas for strategy that I want to propose to you.

1.Use
the recent United Nations report

Last
week, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights criticized
Canada
again, and rightly so.The UN
watchdog group scolded
Canada
for its failure to live up to its commitment under the international treaty that
protects people’s economic, social and cultural rights.The Committee grilled Canadian government reps for two days, questioning
its record on poverty, homelessness, indigenous and immigrant rights, health and
education.It found the situation in
Canada
wanting in all areas and in some cases worse than when they last examined the
country’s record.The UN Committee
uses the term national
emergency to describe
Canada
’s homeless situation.

Your
situation in
Thunder Bay
, like the rest of the country, is highlighted by discriminatory government
policies, which infringe upon the economic, social and cultural rights of
homeless people, First Nations people, women and disabled people.

You
may wish to consider holding your own inquiry, and produce local evidence to
that effect.Involve your community
leaders as panelists, engage members of the media, and prepare a report that
that will bring the UN findings home.

2.Pandemic Flu

Do
you know that the impact predictions in
Thunder Bay
’s pandemic plan are: 70-160 deaths, 290-680 hospitalized, and the total
affected and sick 24,000-55,000?I
did not see any mention of the words shelter, homeless, housing or poverty in
the
Thunder Bay
plan.

It
is critical that you heighten the urgency for local prevention and public health
reforms, to protect people living in poverty and other compromising situations
such as shelters or correctional facilities from a pandemic.

Toronto
’s blackout taught us that low-income people including seniors and people with
disabilities couldn’t afford even a simple loss of electricity, let alone plan
to stockpile for a pandemic.

I
will not spend more time on that, but my March newsletter on the TDRC website
goes into more detail.

3.Join forces with us in the National
Housing and Homelessness Network to add a strong northern voice.

I probably don’t need to
tell you why it would be helpful for us to have a voice from the north on our
monthly NHHN calls.It is free and
your agency could be the disseminator of information and action strategies to
your wider community.

November 22 is National
Housing Day; marking the day the Big City Mayors Caucus of the Federation of
Canadian Municipalities declared homelessness a national disaster.Events are happening across the country on National Housing Day - try and
plan something here.

These are a few of my ideas;
I hope you will come up with some of your own.

From then to now

The early nurses that made
history in
Thunder Bay
worked in severe conditions.In the
years that followed we have seen tremendous campaigns that introduced employment
insurance, pensions, employment standards, minimum wage, medicare and a
national housing program.

Our national housing program
was taken away from us in 1993, and we will need to fight if we want to get it
back!